Following a low-fat diet has many advantages, starting with weight loss. Learn the role fats play in calorie counting and how many fat grams you should eat each day.

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If you are thinking about losing weight, you might want to consider a low-fat diet. It’s a healthy approach that gives you all the nutritional components you need.

The Low-Fat Diet: Everyone Benefits

“I’m a big advocate of following a low-fat diet as an eating plan for life, rather than a diet that you go on and get off,” says Elizabeth Ricanati, MD, medical director for Lifestyle 180 at the Wellness Institute, Cleveland Clinic Foundation. “If you want good health, you need to eat a healthy diet. You don’t put tomato juice in a car and expect it to work.”

In addition to helping you lose weight by using calories on more filling foods, following a low-fat diet can help you ward off serious medical conditions, including heart disease, high cholesterol, and diabetes.

The Low-Fat Diet: Choose Wisely

The body needs some fat to function properly. But even though every gram of fat contains 9 calories, not all fats stack up the same nutritionally. Some are better for you than others:

Unsaturated fats include both monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which come from plants; you know them as olive, corn, and canola oils, among others. (Commonly used plant-based foods you want to avoid because they contain saturated fat are coconut, palm oil, and cocoa butter.) On a low-fat diet that limits the amount of fat you can eat, most of your fats should be from this category.

Saturated fats come from animal products such as meat and dairy foods. They increase the risk of heart disease because they raise the “bad” LDL cholesterol in the body. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 10 percent or less of your daily calories should be from saturated fats. The American Heart Association recommends even less — 7 percent.

Trans fats are found in products like margarines and shortening as well as in many snacks such as cookies, cakes, pies, and potato chips. Trans fats are created when a food manufacturer changes liquid oils into more solid fats, sometimes called “partially hydrogenated oils,” often to increase the shelf life of packaged food. Trans fats can raise your bad cholesterol. Dr. Ricanati recommends avoiding them altogether.

The Low-Fat Diet: Tracking Fat Grams and Calories

To follow a low-fat diet, keep track of how many calories and grams of fat you eat and plan most of your meals around lean protein, vegetables, fruit, and whole grains.

Low-fat diet for maintenance. Current nutritional guidelines from the NIH suggest that only 20 to 35 percent of your total daily intake should come from fat. For the average 2,000-calorie-a-day maintenance diet, that means about 400 to 700 calories, or 44 to 77 grams of total fat per day. Want to follow a low-fat diet? Aim for the low end of that range, with most of the fat in your diet coming from unsaturated sources. To keep saturated fat to 10 percent of your total intake, limit it to 200 calories or 22 grams of fat per day, taken from your daily fat allowance.

Low-fat diet for weight loss. On a weight-loss diet of 1,200 calories, limiting fats to only 20 percent of total daily intake means you can have 240 calories, or 26 grams, of fat each day, with a maximum of 120 calories, or 13 grams, coming from saturated fat. That leaves you nearly 1,000 calories to “spend” on protein and carbohydrates.

While it’s hard to know exactly how many fat grams are in a piece of red meat (you can estimate using a calorie-counting guidebook), for packaged foods, the nutritional label tells you everything you need to know, including total fat grams and calories, and the grams and calories of any saturated and trans fat in the food.

The Low-Fat Diet: Better Building Blocks

“A low-fat diet includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and proteins such as lean meat and fish,” says Tera Fridley, RD, LD, clinical nutrition manager at AVI Foodsystems, Hillcrest Hospital, a Cleveland Clinic hospital in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. How you prepare food is important. Use low-fat methods — baked, roasted, or broiled instead of deep-fried. “You can eat all kinds of delicious foods on a low-fat diet,” Fridley says. “If you have a favorite food that’s high in fat, you can still enjoy it in moderation.”

When calorie counting to lose weight, be sure your calories are spread out wisely:

To get enough calcium, don’t shun dairy products — just choose low-fat or fat-free milk, yogurt, and cheese for your needed three servings a day.

Get your fill of fresh produce — usually 2 cups of fruits and 2 1/2 cups of vegetables — every day. Have a rainbow of colors to get an assortment of vitamins and minerals.

Ricanati emphasizes that a low-fat diet doesn’t need to focus on what you’re skipping: “If you’re trying all the new, wonderful things you can have on a low-fat diet, you’re unlikely to feel deprived.”

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